Wednesday, April 18, 2018

GREASE: 4K Blu-ray (Paramount, 1978) Paramount Home Video

Randal Kleiser’s
Grease (1978) continues to find new
legions of fans. That’s something I suppose, considering it is only a middling
effort as a musical; albeit, with a killer score and the iconic star-making
performance of John Travolta, still riding the crest of instant fame afforded
him from the previous year’s Saturday
Night Fever. Greaseis, of
course, the phenomenally successful film adaptation of the Broadway musical of
the same name, herein trapped in a curious time warp, the mores and manners of
the 1970’s melded to its halcyon-inducing bits of nostalgia for the fabulous
fifties. Most of the original Jim Jacobs/Warren Casey score has survived the
transition from stage to screen with a few new songs written expressly for the
screen. Alas, unlike the idyllic world
of, say, an Andy Hardy, the configuration here of muscle cars, malt shops and
moonlit make-outs in the backseat at the drive-in just seem to retain an
artifice untrue to its narrative time frame. Nostalgia for the fifties was big
in ’78 thanks in part to an earlier kick start from George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973). Yet Grease doesn’t feel like the fifties; the
actors – all of them – far too old to convince as teenagers. Lest we forget
John Travolta was 24 in 1978; Olivia Newton-John – his senior at 30, and
Annette Charles, as the raunchy/high-stepping Cha-Cha, also 30, but looking at
least 10 years everyone else’s senior.

There is no
doubt Greasesolidified John
Travolta’s fame as an international pop icon. It also brought spandex back in
style and put Olivia Newton-John on U.S. pop charts – a love affair that was
brief at best and all but killed off by her epic implosion in the musical
misfire, Xanadu (1980). In
retrospect, Grease moves like
gangbusters with songs that are ‘electrifying’
and an energy that is…well, ‘greased
lightnin’. Yet, in comparing the
film to other musical entertainments of its vintage – or even musicals in
general – one finds very little to recommend it as an exemplar of the genre.
Bronte Woodard’s screenplay Ginsus the romance between Aussie export, Sandy Olson
and her greaser boy toy, Danny Zucco into truncated vignettes and failed
flagrante delictos, clumsily strung together and book-ended by songs. When Kleiser
paints these ‘boy meets girl’ cardboard cutouts into a narrative corner (and
frequently, he does) the movie simply breaks them into song to divert attention
away from the fact there is virtually zero substance to his picture-making
style. Like all Hollywood musicals gone past the expiration date of the studio
system, having crumbled to dust by the mid-1960’s, Greasesuffers from a total dearth of precisely the sorts of
behind-the-scenes stock company each studio kept in its heyday that would have lent
stardust magic to its puff pastry of studio-bound pastiche. Patricia Birch’s
choreography amounts to little more ambitious than a lot of hip-swiveling and
highly sexualized gyrations, some mindless chaotic flailing, and, as equally
un-balletic leaps from the cast off the furniture and occasionally, moving
vehicles (the much-lauded Hand Jive is not a dance, folks).

Greaseis a revival – of sorts, tricked out in re-imagined
costuming and a top-selling soundtrack. Alas, it all but embalms the fifties in
a thick coat of 70’s fantastic plastic: a lot of sun, sex and slick to mask a
one-note wonder. Unequivocally, Greasepleasantly passes the time. Nevertheless, it remains a vacuous and rather
simplistic distillation of that buttoned-down and poodle-skirted epoch,
immortalized in the annals of real – rather than ‘reel’ history as the age of
Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Bobby Rydell. That Grease has endured for so long is a testament, although I am not
entirely certain as to what…good timing? Bad
taste? Or our collective pop culture amnesia, chronically to set aside the past
in favor of the proverbial ‘next best thing’ that, more oft’ than not, turns
out to be half as good?Grease lacks the finesse of a
studio-bound movie musical. In its absence, we get John Travolta – clearly, one
of the emerging stars of his generation who went on to do ‘other/better’ movies.
What Travolta has cannot be taught: a presence that clicks with audiences. We
will stop short of labeling it ‘animal magnetism’ because its hypnotic sway has
proven to falter – on occasion, horrendously – when the mixture of elements surrounding
him are not quite so. A real star can rise above his material. But Travolta (and
I am venturing out on a limb here) is not a great actor. He possesses the
chutzpah of a showman and the inherent sexiness of the blue-eyed boy next door no
self-respecting girl could introduce to her mother. He relies heavily on body
language and his undeniable good looks as subterfuge in lieu of any genuine
acting ability. This too can go a long way. Cute sells. Sex too. Sex more,
actually. And its ether has carried Travolta to heights that few of his limited
range are able to scale and remain on top for so long.

It may appear as
though I am needlessly bashing both a beloved cultural touchstone and a ‘star’
who – let’s face it – was gutsy enough to put on a fat woman’s suit for Hairspray (2007). However (in)sincerely
then, I admit to two things: first, like so many growing up in the 1970’s, I
too fell under the spell of Grease’s
song n’ dance silliness, and second, in the years since moving beyond the naïveté
of my own youth, I really cannot quantify the reasons why Grease – despite its myriad of artistic flaws and faux pas - has
nevertheless stayed with me as a fondly recollected memory. It remains a
diverting pop-u-tainment – yes. But it never comes across as anything better
than a frenetic explosion of crass commercialism where the seeming ‘life and death’ crises of oversexed
teenagers are played strictly as camp. As big a star as Travolta became in the
seventies because of this movie, were Grease
truly a musical ‘from’ the 1950’s, his talents would register as merely good
enough to play the guy on the side, in support of the real/reel ‘name above the
title’. The most interesting performance
in the picture is, in fact, given by Stockard Channing (then, a sage 34 yrs.),
as the devilish and sexually-liberated Rizzo. She suffers a pregnancy scare and
evolves – almost magically – into the sadder but wiser young tart of this over-the-hill
Hollywoodized hoodlum sect.

What remains renewably
infectious about Grease then, is the
energetic – if utterly naïve – way Kleiser and his cast sell its less-than-perfect
claptrap to the audience with far less sincerity for the material. It is therefore
one of Kleiser’s great inspirations to have populated the backdrop of his movie
with a cavalcade of genuine icons from the 1950’s, old enough to remember them
fondly and remind us of their glory, including Eve ‘Our Miss Brooks’ Arden as
Principal McGee, Sid Caesar (Coach Calhoun), Ed ‘Kookie’ Byrnes (as
hip-swiveler/radio jock, Vince Fontaine), Joan Blondell (malt shop waitress,
Vi) and, as the fantasy ‘Teen Angel’ called
upon by the most ‘mixed up
non-delinquent’ and beauty school dropout, Frenchie (Didi Conn), none other
than beach blanket fav, Frankie Avalon. Kleiser also gets a lot of mileage out
of Sha Na Na; in retrospect, the as bizarrely trend-setting rock n’ roll ensemble
whose act simultaneously revived and parodied the fab fifties in gaudy gold lamé,
leather jackets, pomaded pompadours and greased up ducktail hairdos. A
different time, I suppose, but Sha Na Na was wildly popular then, even hosting
their own weekly variety show from 1977 to 1981. In Greasethey are simply ‘the
band’ – augmenting the ‘dance off’ competition with reworked renditions of
such pop standards as ‘Blue Moon’ and
‘Hound Dog’.

Plot wise: it’s
senior year at ‘rockin’ Rydell High School. Our story zeros in on Sandy Olsson
(Newton-John) a goody-two-shoes bobbysoxer from Australia who is destined to be
corrupted by greaser, Danny Zucco (Travolta). From the wrong side of the
tracks, but with his heart in the right place, Danny is forced into an
impossible confrontation with Sandy by his ex, Rizzo (Stockard Channing). Currently
the girlfriend of Danny’s best pal, Kenickie (Jeff Conway), Rizzo knows Danny
is genuinely in love with Sandy. She also acknowledges that our purebred Sandy
is ‘hopeless devoted’ to Danny. To
save face with his buddies, Danny alienates Sandy at a pep rally. Good for his
image. Bad for his love life. Utterly humiliated, Sandy goes off with jock, Tom
Chisum (a blond Lorenzo Lamas whose ‘brains
are in his biceps’), leaving Danny to do just about anything he can to get
her back. Eventually, true love prevails. After all, this is a musical. But the road to happiness is not without its
potholes.

After Rydell is
selected to star in a live televised ‘dance off’ competition hosted by dreamy
D.J. Vince Fontaine, Rizzo plots yet again to wreck Danny’s chances with Sandy,
reintroducing him to another former flame – Cha-Cha. She has brought her
tough-as-nails boyfriend, Leo (Dennis Stewart) in for a piece of the action. It’s
something of an ego-crushing heartbreak for Sandy to discover our Danny gets
around like an alley cat in heat. Sensing his previous relationship with
Cha-Cha may not be entirely finished (Cha-Cha steals Danny away from Sandy
during the dance off and helps him win the competition), Sandy leaves the
auditorium in tears. A short while later, she succumbs to the allure of a
transformation from the girls, becoming precisely the sort of leather and
spandex-clad vixen that appeals to Danny’s less than honorable intentions. At
the year-end high school carnival, Danny gets reintroduced to this new ‘and
improved’ Sandy, who sells her stiletto and sexpot image with great success. He
better shape-up, however, because this Sandy needs a real man to keep her
satisfied. I suppose we can forgive Sandy, sacrificing wholesome morals to turn
herself inside out for a guy. After all, her head has yet to be twisted by
sixties bra-burning feminism.

Greasemay not be a stellar musical. Most assuredly, it
bears no resemblance to high art. But it does effectively pass the time with a
lot of inhuman noise set to a toe-tapping rhythm. Today, it is heralded as a
fondly recalled time capsule more than a bona fide film classic. This is
probably the best its enduring legacy can – or rather, should attain. That newer
generations, not around in 1978, continue to re-discover it is more the mystery
here. Grease has been endlessly
reincarnated and lampooned as everything from an episode of TV’s popular series,
Glee (2009-15) to a complete revival
on the small screen in 2016, likely owed its Broadway roots more than this
movie. And yet, it is the iconography of the ’78 picture that keeps coming back;
the ‘one that we want’ over and over
again, like the faint odor of sweaty gym socks left to ferment in the backseat
of the family car on a sweltering hot summer afternoon after football practice.
So, Greaseis the word, is the word, is word…and likely to persist for as long
as youth continues to catch the novelty full force and unearth something
perennially appealing about it. Precisely what this intangible quality is
remains open for discussion. I am certain I have neither the time nor the
inclination to satisfy such a query.

While Grease’s artistic integrity is up for
grabs, no one ought to be disputing the remastered Greasein 4K. First up, thanks to a contractual dispute between
Coke, Paramount Pictures and Pepsi, virtually all previous home video releases depicting
scenes in the malt shop had their product placement digitally obscured; the
result, a few extremely clumsy looking ‘mattes’ that created disturbing and
thoroughly fuzzy halos around actors walking back and forth in front of them. Apparently,
producer Allan Carr orchestrated a deal with Pepsi for product placement in the
picture, only to learn Kleiser had already shot these scenes with vintage Coca-Cola
ads plastered all over the set. It proved a double-edged sword, as no one had
actually cleared the rights with Coke Inc. first. While the brouhaha was settled
out of court, even as the picture hit theaters, Coke denied Paramount
permission to reissue Greaseon home
video unless all product placement for their brand was removed. Until this 4K
release, all reissues of Grease, both theatrical on home video, from VHS to
LaserDisc to DVD, and finally, Blu-ray, suffered this indignation.

Well, prepare to
be astonished, as they used to say, because for Grease’s 40th anniversary, Paramount has accessed an
original camera negative, restored most of the Coke ads and altered only a
handful. The crystal clarity of Grease
in 4K will surely startle and impress. Viewing Greasein 4K is like experiencing the movie for the very first time
– or perhaps, more astutely put – like never before. Without embellishment of
any kind, this UHD transfer is a revelation. Colors are so rich and vibrant
they make Paramount’s previous Blu-ray look chalky, wan and careworn. Contrast
is equally impressive with deep, solid blacks. Film grain is velvety smooth and
HDR has been sparingly applied. There really is no comparing Greasein any other home video format
to this 4K release. It will blow your mind. The other epiphany…the DTS 5.1
audio derived, for the very first time, from restored original magnetic 70mm
roadshow elements. Again, it’s like hearing Grease as never before; dialogue, ultra-crisp, the score pulsating
with subtleties in its orchestral accompaniment absent all these years. Extras are all ported over from the previous ‘Rockin’
Rydell’ Blu-ray and are included only on the standard Blu-ray disc included
with this 4K release. The extras include
both vintage and featurettes produced for Grease’s
20th Anniversary, plus 11 deleted scenes, and interviews with cast
and crew, and, a very brief ‘making of’ featurette. Bottom line: Grease is gorgeous in 4K. It’s still a
flawed film, wildly entertaining to most and moderately disappointing for
others like myself. While I continue to be amazed by its popularity there is no
denying that in 4K, Greasewill
likely remain ‘the word’ for a very long time.

About Me

Nick Zegarac is a freelance writer/editor and graphics artist. He holds a Masters in Communications and an Honors B.A in Creative Lit from the University of Windsor.
He is currently a freelance writer and has been a contributing editor for Black Moss Press and is a featured contributor to online's The Subtle Tea. He's also has had two screenplays under consideration in Hollywood.
Last year he finished his first novel and is currently searching for an agent to represent him.
Contact Nick via email at movieman@sympatico.ca